For the most part, my copy of Letters from Max is unmarked. No circles around words with lines leading to other circled words. Minimal scrawls in the margins. This is due to the simple fact that I never wanted to stop reading in order to pick up a pen.

The C-word. Cancer. I’m sure if you interviewed ten people and asked them what their top three fears are, this one would make the list. And in a time in which we’re all necessarily exposed to the environmental risks posed by advances in the manufacturing industry, big agribusiness, and global warming, this fear is heightened.

The Lake Michigan Mermaid is a beautiful and haunting collection of poems about a relationship between a young girl and a freshwater mermaid. The poems alternate between the voice of the girl and voice of the mermaid, with Anne-Marie Oomen writing the girl’s poems and Linda Nemec Foster writing the mermaid’s. And woven throughout the book are lovely watercolor illustrations by Meridith Ridl.

Ahmed Ismail Yusuf’s The Lion’s Binding Oath and Other Stories, presents an insider’s view of everyday life in Somalia during the mid to late 20th century. Yusuf had fled his birth country in the late 1980s during the Somalia civil war, and has since lived, educated himself, and worked in Minnesota.

Have you ever taken homemade food to a picnic just to have it ignored? Then you might recognize yourself in Vincent Chu’s story called “Ambrosia,” which appears in his first book of short fictions, Like a Champion. In it, our narrator’s girlfriend brings the sweet dessert to a barbecue with this result: “In the middle of the table sits the uneaten ambrosia, cubes of strange fruit drowning slow deaths in white glob, wincing under the summer sun.” But in this case, a simple sentence will turn the embarrassing situation around with unexpected results.

Are you happy? What is the source of your happiness? Would you say it’s love? Steven Gillis provides us with a few different answers to these questions in his new novel Liars. His characters find themselves either concretely sure of themselves, or questioning everything they know in this thrilling, somber story of a man trying to understand love.

Minna Zallman Proctor’s Landslide is a collection of “true stories” (essays, really) that focus on matters of family, familiar dysfunction, and/or love gone awry. The essays cover a wide swatch of time, with stories from Proctor’s childhood, her young adult years, and her present, and though each essay can be read separately, together they ask a question that comes up several times: Is Proctor fated to repeat her mother’s life?

The opening poems of Alan Felsenthal’s Lowly suggest a collection that will fall squarely within a familiar subgenre of contemporary poetry: newly crafted myths, fables, and parables. Taking up classic modes of speech and story-telling, many poems of this subgenre operate according to a fairly defined mechanic, developing tight, logical sequences that utilize inversion, tautology, and other structural maneuvers to arrive at illuminating surprises—often with a bit of jesting. This mechanic perfectly describes the first poem of Lowly, “Two Martyrs."